Narrating The City: spaces Of Urban Change, South London

2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-17
Author(s):  
Suzanne M. Hall

This paper explores the documentation of social and spatial transformation in the Walworth area, South London. Spatial narratives are the entry point for my exploration, where official and ‘unofficial’ representations of history are aligned to capture the nature of urban change. Looking at the city from street level provides a worldly view of social encounter and spaces that are expressive of how citizens experience and shape the city. A more distanced view of the city accessed from official data reveals different constructs. In overlaying near and far views and data and experience, correlations and contestations emerge. As a method of research, the narrative is the potential palimpsest, incorporating fragments of the immediate and historic without representing a comprehensive whole. In this paper Walworth is documented as a local and Inner City context where remnants and insertions are juxtaposed, where white working class culture and diverse ethnicities experience difference and change. A primary aim is to consider the diverse experiences of groups and individuals over time, through their relationship with their street, neighbourhood and city. In relating the Walworth area to London I use three spatial narratives to articulate the contemporary and historic relationship of people to place: the other side examines the physical discrimination between north and south London, the other half looks at distinctions of class and race and other histories explores the histories displaced from official accounts.

Multilingua ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mieke Vandenbroucke

AbstractThis paper focuses on how different historical stages of socio-economic development in Brussels are played out on the ground over time in one particular inner-city neighbourhood, the Quartier Dansaert. In particular, I document the history of this neighbourhood and how urban change and gentrification have impacted the outlook of multilingualism and the development of multilingual discourses and language hierarchies in its material and semiotic landscape over time. By using the rich history of multilingualism in the Quartier Dansaert as a case-study, I argue in favour of more historically-sensitive and longitudinal approaches to social and, in particular, linguistic change as played out in urban landscape.


Author(s):  
William B. Meyer

One of the earliest historians of the Civil War saw it as a fundamental clash between the peoples of different latitudes. Climate had made the antebellum North and South distinct societies and natural enemies, John W. Draper argued, the one democratic and individualist, the other aristocratic and oligarchical. If such were the case, the future of the reunited states was hardly a bright one. But Draper saw no natural barriers to national unity that wise policy could not surmount. The restlessness and transience of American life that many deplored instead merited, in his view, every assistance possible. In particular, he wrote, Americans needed to be encouraged to move as freely across climatic zones as they already did within them. The tendency of North and South to congeal into hostile types of civilization could be frustrated, but only by an incessant mingling of people. Sectional discord was inevitable only if the natural law that "emigrants move on parallels of latitude" were left free to take its course. These patterns of emigration were left free, for the most part, but without the renewed strife that Draper feared. After the war as before it, few settlers relocating to new homes moved far to the north or south of their points of origin. As late as 1895, Henry Gannett, chief geographer to the U.S. Census, could still describe internal migration as "mainly conducted westward along parallels of latitude." More often as time went on, it was supposed that race and not merely habit underlay the pattern, that climatic preferences were innate, different stocks of people staying in the latitudes of their forbears by the compulsion of biology. Thus, it was supposed, Anglo-Saxons preferred cooler lands than Americans of Mediterranean ancestry, while those of African descent preferred warmer climates than either. Over time, though, latitude loosened its grip and exceptions to the rule multiplied. As the share of the population in farming declined, so did the strongest reason for migrants to stay within familiar climates. Even by the time Gannett wrote, the tendency that he described, though still apparent, was weaker than it had been at mid-century. It weakened because a preference for familiar climates was not a fixed human trait but one shaped by experience and wants, and capable of changing as these variables changed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-110
Author(s):  
Anja Danner-Schröder

This article examines how events from the past, present, and future form into event structures over time. This question is addressed by investigating the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 until the fifth anniversary in 2016. This allowed to analyze different events over time. The findings reveal that events can be used in two different ways. One process was meant to focus on events, whereas the other one backgrounded events. These different ways to use events revealed four different mechanisms of how event structures can be formed. Moreover, each mechanism has its own idiosyncratic temporal orientation toward either a nostalgic past, imagined future, “better” future or critical past. Second, the article contributes that the paradoxical ways of focusing on an event and backgrounding the very same event need to be embraced simultaneously to enable a greater sense of wholeness. Last, the article reveals multiple temporalities within and across temporal trajectories.


Author(s):  
Nichola Khan

Nichola Khan provides the introduction to this book, by bringing into conversation some prominent figures, each of whom has been engaged with issues related to violence in Karachi for at least one decade, some many more. The collection addresses some perennial global, national, and city crises which have precipitated waves of violence in Karachi, and it highlights an increase in critical voices and commentary alongside a greater willingness by publishers to take on the controversies these phenomena entail. First, it combines the diverse specialist insights, generated over time, of key academics, publishers, journalists, activists, and writers; thereby it differs from the usual academic “study” of a “type” of violence, group, or political party in the city. A second focus is on personal and professional engagement, and on ways each dimension might inform the other. Third, the book brings these aspects to a public engagement agenda, encouraging a shift outwards from the purely academic realm towards the creation of wider publics and counterpublics engaged in cultural and political commentary, and collective collaborations for change.


2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 325-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanliu Lin ◽  
Bruno De Meulder ◽  
Shifu Wang

This paper examines the changes in the ways in which villagers have gained access to resources and services over time in what are now “villages in the city” within the city of Guangzhou. It compares and contrasts three periods: the clan-based traditional villages, the commune period and the period since the 1980s (which includes great economic success in many villages). It also discusses how migrants fit within this, as they have come to form a very large part of the population in these “villages in the city” but are largely excluded from state provision and from the benefits accruing to “villagership”.


Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Rob Waters

Abstract This article concentrates on the development of an inner-city imaginary, and a linked suburban imaginary, in the era of post-war reconstruction and post-colonial migration. It argues that these two historical processes – reconstruction and migration – need to be seen as interlinked phenomena, which bound the histories of race and class together. First, it proposes that understanding how the inner city developed and was lived as a structure of feeling requires attending to its meaning both among those who peopled its often-nebulous borders, and among those who escaped it but nonetheless measured their escape by it. Second, it proposes that understanding the popular force of inner city and suburb as imaginative spaces means recognizing how they became crucial landscapes in a revived culture of respectability, which in the second half of the twentieth century became a racialized culture. This was the other migration that defined what the inner city meant.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 618-637
Author(s):  
Meriç Kırmızı

Japanese urban change after the 1990s, studied mostly under the name of reurbanization or “return to the city centres,” was little understood abroad. To locate Japan in the literature on gentrification, the Horie neighborhood in Osaka's Nishi Ward was studied as an example of post–bubble neighborhood change. The aim of this study was to account for Horie's present situation after Tachibana Street's revitalization from the perspectives of different social groups. The research, based on a three–year long qualitative field study, found that the attitudes of these various social groups to revitalization were connected to the type and intensity of their relationships with the area. Furthermore, Horie's lack of irresolvable social tensions over revitalization indicated a major difference between Japanese post–industrial urban change and other gentrification models of the Global North and South. The study concludes by suggesting we should think out of the revitalization construct to protect the local neighborhood culture.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1666
Author(s):  
Ares Kalandides ◽  
Boris Grésillon

City marketing has a strong tradition in Berlin, with two organizations, Berlin Partner and Visit Berlin, responsible for designing and implementing relevant strategies. Sustainability has been on and off the city marketing agenda, almost exclusively in its environmental dimension. In this article, we examine the current representations of Berlin as a “sustainable city” in the official city marketing strategies. We look at how sustainability is used and instrumentalized to create a specific city profile and also to attract particular target groups in tourism. We propose an analysis of sustainable planning in Berlin since reunification to show how it has moved into different directions over time and how this has (or has not) been followed by city marketing. In this endeavor, we move between the existing, and as we argue deeper and more sophisticated, environmental planning of the city on one hand, and the reductions and simplifications of city marketing representations on the other. Finally, we argue that there are inherent contradictions in marketing a sustainable city, where both in terms of tourism and economic development, the concept of growth seems to be reaching environmental limits.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2 (26)) ◽  
pp. 14-21
Author(s):  
Lutfullo E. Ismoilov ◽  
Jazgul R. Rahimova

The purpose of this article is to show the complex relationship of the Sheybanid rulers with the local Maverannahr Sufi brotherhoods - naqshbandiya, kubraviya and jahriya (yassaviya). The main materials for this study were information from Persian-language sources and Muslim hagiographic writings ( manakib ) of that period. The second generation of the Sheybanids, whose representatives came to power in the middle 30s of the 16th century, unlike their predecessors, sought to establish trusting relations with the leaders of the various Sufi brotherhoods of Maverannahr. After the death of the great Khan Kuchkunji Khan (died in 1534), Ubaidulla (died in 1540), whose residence was in Bukhara, became the new great khan of nomadic Uzbeks. He maintained close relations with such well-known leaders of the Sufi brotherhoods of that period as the leader of the naqshbandi brotherhood - Khoja Ahmad Kosoni (died in 1549), the leader of the kubraviya brotherhood - Sheikh Hussein Khorezmi (died in 1551), etc. In the other large political center of Maverannahr - Samarkand, after the death of Kuchkunji Khan, his sons Abu Said Khan and Fulad Sultan became co-rulers of the city. They established very close relations with prominent Sufi leaders. In the 50-60s of the 16th century, due to the political ambitions of a new generation of Sheybanids, the country plunged into political chaos and a state of instability. Almost all famous Sufi leaders of that period supported the claims of Sheibanid Abdullah Khan II (died 1598) on the Khan’s throne.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-170
Author(s):  
François Blanciak

Infrastructure has become a relatively established field of inquiry in architectural academia over the last two decades, insofar as it builds on the rational and generative overtones of the term. However, the contrasting possibility that infrastructure might represent an obstacle for the city and its architecture has often been overlooked. Simultaneously, the idea that the city might be considered as a piece of architecture that can be comprehended, controlled, and eventually designed as a whole (whether from scratch or incrementally), has recently resurfaced, echoing Aldo Rossi's concept of ‘primary elements’. In his seminal book The Architecture of the City, Rossi described the way these elements ‘participate in the evolution of the city over time in a permanent way, often becoming identified with the major artefacts constituting the city’. But, he noted: [p]rimary elements are not only monuments, just as they are not only fixed activities; in a general sense they are those elements capable of accelerating the process of urbanization in a city, and they also characterize the processes of spatial transformation in an area larger than the city.


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